Information systems (IS) are getting larger and more complex, becoming ‘gargantuan’.
IS practices have not evolved in step to handle the development and maintenance of
these gargantuan systems, leading to a variety of quality issues. The community recognises
that they need to develop an appropriate organising architecture and are making
significant efforts [1]. Examples include the System Engineering Modeling Language
(SysML), the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) and 4 + 1
Architectural Blueprints [2]. Most of these follow IEEE 1471-2000’s [3] recommendation
to use view models.
We believe that these efforts are missing a key component – an information grounding
view. In this paper, we firstly describe this view. Then we suggest a way to provide an
architecture for it – foundational ontologies – and a way of assessing them – metaphysical
choices. We illustrate how the metaphysical choices are made and how this can affect
information modelling.